Teamcenter gives technical staff across the laboratory a central place to share all things engineering. With a single system, employees can access with just a few mouse clicks the lab's substantial repository of engineering data, documents and drawings.

"Teamcenter provides the technical staff with information in a quick and reliable way," said Rich Stanek, Teamcenter program sponsor. "Everyone can see original engineering data and track it as it's updated."

Teamcenter is gaining traction. Prior to Teamcenter coming online in January 2012, nearly all of the laboratory's engineering data was stored in various data silos or where it was most practical for employees to access it—on their own hard drives or local networks.

Now approximately 30 Fermilab employees use Teamcenter daily. In addition, 15 users outside Fermilab have been trained to use Teamcenter for collaborative projects such as PXIE and the proposed LBNE.

"To realize its full potential, we would like every engineer and design employee at Fermilab to begin using it," Stanek said. "With more participants, we can do comprehensive, concurrent engineering across divisions and departments and take advantage of common designs."

Teamcenter's holdings include 4,000 CAD models and a standard-parts library of 30,000 components. It has capabilities for cross-referencing notes and commenting documents and component drawings. It also features a migration tool for those who want to move their older data from local disks to Teamcenter.

Future plans include making it easier for users to access Teamcenter and adding a capability for storing engineering requirements.

Like every good computing tool, Teamcenter comes with thorough technical support, including written instructions, training videos and a team of Fermilab staff members who are ready to answer questions.

"If anyone needs assistance, we can help them get started with Teamcenter," said Tony Metz, Teamcenter program manager. "We want to help make the transition as smooth as possible and get people comfortable using the system."

To begin using Teamcenter, employees complete a two-day basic training course. Courses are offered monthly and can be viewed on Fermilab's TRAIN database. Group courses are also available.

Learn more about Teamcenter at its website. Those who would like help using Teamcenter or who have questions about it may submit a Service Desk ticket, which will be routed to Bob Andree or Tony Metz.

—Leah Hesla

Photo of the Day

New Fermilab bike share program

Having put all her eggs in one basket, a bird successfully converted this one-seater into a bicycle built for two. Photo: Michael Kirby, SCD

Milestone

Terry Wyatt elected as Fellow of the Royal Society

Terry Wyatt, former DZero spokesperson and professor of physics at the University of Manchester in the UK, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Royal Society elected Wyatt as a fellow in recognition of his work developing and implementing "powerful new discriminants of signatures for the production of heavy quarks (b and t) and electroweak bosons (W and Z)," which "resulted in measurements of unprecedented precision."

Milky Way makes small massive gain

From Scientific American, May 3, 2013

Weighing the Milky Way is no easy task. It's not like you can just step outside the galaxy and place it on a humongous scale.

Plus, most of the galaxy's heft is in invisible dark matter, which betrays its presence only through its gravitational pull. So astronomers have devised clever ways of inferring the mass of our galaxy by measuring how it pulls on smaller objects moving around it.

A new estimate, based on its effect on the motion of a nearby dwarf galaxy, has the Milky Way a bit beefier than some past measurements that relied on the motions of massive stars. The study is in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Large Hadron Collider's worldwide computer

From isgtw, May 1, 2013

Mid-February marked the end of the first three-year run of CERN's Large Hadron collider (LHC). While the machine exceeded all expectations, delivering significantly more data to the experiments than initially foreseen, high-performance distributed computing also enabled physicists to announce on 4 July the discovery of a new particle. With the first run now over, it is a good time to look back at the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to see what was initially planned, how it performed and what is foreseen for the future.

Treasuring history

Fermilab Director Pier Oddone

Last Saturday I attended the Pre-Fermilab Tenant Picnic, more familiarly referred to as the Farmer's Picnic. For many years now, this event has brought together the families that farmed the land around Fermilab for generations before the lab was established. As with many events at Fermilab, former and current lab employees volunteer their time to organize the picnic. Some of the employees are related to the farm families, and all treasure the opportunity to share good food and, more importantly, stories about the land and the times before the laboratory was established. Over the years employees of the laboratory who also grew up on the farms before the lab was established have attended the picnics. They provide historical continuity and narratives of how the landscape has changed—and also not changed—under Fermilab's stewardship.

Clearly, if Fermilab were not here today, the 6,800 acres of our laboratory would look like the suburban development and shopping malls that surround the laboratory, and would in no way be distinguished from the rest of suburbia. Today, however, Fermilab is something of an oasis from the suburban surroundings, and visitors and neighbors enjoy the site as a public park. The site has a large restored prairie, significant land leased to agriculture, lakes stocked with fish and diverse forests.

At the time Fermilab was established in the late 1960s, our site was countryside, populated by 56 farms. To create the Fermilab site, 56 families were displaced from their homesteads. Many of the farms and barns have since been maintained, and the families that came on Saturday, sometimes bringing multiple generations with them, could visit their ancestral homes. Some of the farms were relocated to the Village and are today used as part of users' housing facilities. Many of the barns are still in place and used for a variety of purposes, from housing the bison to a venue for square dancing and many other events in Kuhn barn.

Before I started attending these Farmer's Picnics and enjoying the great potlucks, I imagined that the families would feel some resentment that they were displaced from their land. To my surprise, the feeling is exactly the opposite: They love Fermilab and the efforts that the laboratory has made to curate the land and its buildings. I imagine they realize that without Fermilab, there would be nothing to show their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren.

If you are interested in reading the history of these 56 farms, obtain a copy of the publication "Remembrance of Things Past" from Fermilab archivist Valerie Higgins or at the welcome desk in the Wilson Hall atrium. You can also visit the Fermilab History and Archives Project Web page.

Fermilab employees and neighbors turn out for this year's Farmer's Picnic at Kuhn Barn.

Construction Update

Geothermal wells for IARC

Energy efficiency is a major goal of the IARC Office, Technical and Education Building. Contributing to its energy efficiency is a geothermal system for heating and cooling. The project is installing 40 geothermal wells, each extending to a depth of more than 500 feet, to take advantage of the Earth as a heat source in the winter and a heat repository in the summer.